Falling Idols (7 page)

“Regardless of what you may think of me and the army I serve, I have no desire to leave dead villagers behind. Whether or not I
do
, is largely your responsibility. Understood?”

Guillaume shut his eyes and nodded slowly and agreed. How sad a day this was, and would that he’d been born deaf so that he would not have to hear himself acquiescing like a toady.

“Dismissed,” Streckenbach said, and of course that was but one more thing to hate.

*

As they were his people, and he their shepherd, he went from home to home to comfort whom he could. Some families had been forced out and into the cottages of neighbors, as their own homes were appropriated for makeshift barracks and, in one case, a ward for the wounded.

The pile of confiscated weapons grew, with hunting rifles and shotguns and pistols, even implements of daily life on the farm such as pitchforks and scythes. Their lives were no longer their own in Château-sur-Lac, and even God seemed very far away.

Late afternoon, Guillaume left the heart of the village and trudged back up the hill to his church and rectory. For a minute, at the very least, he stood over and contemplated ruts dug into the earth by a heedless motorcycle. He stamped them flat, smoothed them over until no trace of tire remained, then bypassed both home and church. Onward, to the cool dim recesses of the stable.

He found it inside, that hateful thing whose very existence mocked the divine creation beneath its feet. It stood in one of the stalls, stroking the sculpted neck of one of the horses and murmuring into its ear. Beside it the beast looked like a Shetland pony to a normal man.

Such was his first sight of this abomination: the ghastly face, the gigantic stature, the clothing that looked crudely sewn together from existing garments to meet the task of covering its outsize frame. Guillaume saw, and could believe in devils.

“You came,” it said, like a child who feared to trust its own delight.

Guillaume swallowed down his disgust and tried to offer a reassuring smile. “You doubted?”

Nomad patted the horse’s mane, then hurried out of the stall with great jerking movements. Crossing the stable with the self-conscious embarrassment of one who lived in the humblest of abodes yet sought still to be a proper host. The sight was a travesty of everything human, and at last it bid him join itself, seated on bales of hay.

“Giselle?” it asked. “Is she…?”

“Come to no harm.”

And how could something so appalling as that face show such relief? It must have been a trick of light.

“Not yet,” Guillaume added, and yes, that face showed its true wretchedness at once. “With the Germans, who can tell what they will do? Who can wake up each morning with the assurance that there’s no bullet or bayonet for them that day?”

Nomad plucked loose pieces of straw from the bale, let them fall to the floor. “Is there no love in them for anything good and kind and gentle?”

“None. They love only conquest.”

Guillaume watched the thing go through the motions of thought and anguish. These seeds he was planting were falling on fertile soil, he could tell, needing only the proper watering to bear the terrible fruits for which he hoped.

He pressed on: “You have a great and tremendous rage within you, do you not?”

“I once did,” said Nomad, in a voice of something lost. “I once, long ago, told my creator, ‘If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.’ And how I devoted myself to that heinous mission. But now I believe that even devils must tire of provoking suffering, when suffering faces are all they see. And I have even come to believe that those same devils must despair themselves as amateurs when compared to the likes of Mankind. You have, yourselves, taken over their task with so much more efficiency.” Nomad lifted his gaze, then his arm, to the stable door and beyond. “How many wars have I seen? I no longer remember. So what fear can I cause that would not be welcomed over an invading army?”

“Ah,” said Father Guillaume, and he must not be swayed by this creature’s pretense to remorse, “but what of the fear you might bring to the invading army itself? Is it possible that your natural inclinations might then be put to a greater good?” He let that sink in, then clinched it: “If for no other’s sake than that of Giselle’s.”

The thing turned a wide, watery eye upon him. “How can you wear those robes and ask this of me?”

“I care more for the oppressed than the oppressor. It’s no more complicated than that.” He drew a breath and tried not to choke on the next words. “And if you do this for me, for Giselle, I will then offer you my hand, in friendship … and in love.”

“Love,” said Nomad, musing the sound and taste of the word, as if something foreign. “Then I ask one thing of you beforehand. Please, allow what I do to be a holy task. Bring me your sacraments.”

Guillaume drew back, could not help himself.
“What?”

“The bread, the wine. The blessing.”

This thing was asking too much, and for what? He doubted very much that it even possessed a soul, and surely, in all its years, no priest would have offered it baptism. He would play no part in desecrating the Eucharist. Would not see his church reduced to giving legitimacy to monstrosities which by all that was right and holy should not exist at all. He would not,
would not
—

“As you wish,” Guillaume heard himself say, and felt his feet take him to the door.

*

She came suddenly awake in the night, and moved only enough to reassure herself of the warm, familiar nest of her own bed. She blinked, then looked over at Sister Anna-Marie, whose slow and even breaths continued undisturbed.

Had she been dreaming? Something had pierced sleep.

There — again, and Giselle sat upright in her bed, as at once the world expanded beyond her to include the whole of her village.

From below, down the hill, came the crack of a rifle, lonely and desolate and full of terrible foreboding. A cry, then, of mortal anguish, and next a rip of machine pistol fire. The after-ring of each sound hung in the silent crystalline perfection of the November night.

Giselle cast aside the quilts and bolted from her bed, then wrapped her cloak about her and didn’t bother with shoes. For a moment she paused near Anna-Marie’s bed, in debate. The old nun slept deeply. Well, let her sleep on. Perhaps she was dreaming of fields in summer, and youth.

Giselle ran into the night, the grass chilly and damp beneath her feet, and as the sounds, with increasing frequency, continued to roll up the hill, she pounded on the Father’s door. There was but a moment’s pause before, calmly, he called for her to enter. He sounded as if he’d been awake all night.

Giselle shivered within her cloak, and found him sitting at his table. No lamp burned, but he’d left the curtains at his dining window pushed aside. He was a black cassock and a pale face immobile in a silver-blue flood of moonlight.

“Sit,” he said, with hand proffered toward a chair. “We’ll wait.”

“Do you not hear?” she cried. “They’re killing the people—”

“No.” Slowly, Father Guillaume shook his head. “They are defending themselves. And I dare hope they finally know the taste of defeat.” He tilted his ear — such bliss! — as if the faraway crash of shattering wood were a faint strain of music. “After so many lifetimes of avoiding the eyes of men, how silent and stealthy must that creature be, when it wishes. And how powerful.”

Giselle felt her knees go weak and she collapsed onto the chair he had offered.

“And what lengths it will go to for the sake of love.”

“
You
set Nomad to this killing?” she cried. “How could you?
How could you?
”

“Because it is what Nomad does, Giselle. It is what Nomad is.” She sought his eyes but they were beyond seeing; his round spectacles were flat replicas of the moon. “In my own heart God is first, and my flock second. On their behalf, He did not answer. So I turned to one that would. Though perhaps Nomad
was
the answer to prayer.”

Bile rose in her throat and she forced it down. “How dare you presume such a thing.”

Father Guillaume spread his hands. “Samson slew an army of Philistines with the jawbone of an ass. Did it just happen to be there? And God smiled. So before you judge … listen.”

She had no more heart with which to argue — it hurt too much. Hers must be the same as the grieving hearts of mothers who see their sons grow out of playful innocence to be hanged as convicted murderers. All mourn for the dead, yes, but they mourn no less for the passing of what potential might have been fulfilled in the living.

And so she listened.

To the frantic cracks of rifles, the bursts of automatic fire. Here a scream, there the concussive blast of a grenade. And still the cries went on. The brittle sound of splintering, as she learned to distinguish wood from bone. Learned to distinguish cry of fear from cry of mortality, and the breaking point in a long, suffering wail when the former became the latter.

And so she listened.

As the deliverance of Château-sur-Lac went on, and on, and on.

*

They didn’t leave the table until after moonlight gave way to dawn, and for two hours or more it had done so in silence. Dawn came with none of its usual innocence and hope, but instead a pall of guilt and apprehension, heavy as clouds.

“Get up, come along,” Giselle told him. “At least see what you’ve done.”

They left the rectory and trudged out upon the hill, far enough beyond the church so that it did not block their view of the village below. Beneath the lightening sky they gazed down upon an eerie tableau where nothing moved but a wafting haze of smoke, and in a place or two, the licking tongues of dying fires. Several bodies in gray uniforms lay strewn about, more than one broken into impossible angles. Another hung limp in a charred black hole blasted through the stone wall of a cottage. Yet another had been slammed halfway through a roof. One in the street had been run through with a shattered length of timber. And the rest? Giselle hoped not to have to see them, inside their charnel houses.

“Where is everyone else?” said Father Guillaume. “I dared believe by now they would be rejoicing.”

“They’re terrified even to look out their windows. Would you be any different, if you didn’t know?” Giselle looked at him without pity. “Be proud. He served you well.”

She left him to dog her footsteps through the clinging mist, and returned to the rectory, the warmth of its fire that had fed well through the night. Giselle huddled at the table and wondered why she hadn’t gone back to the priory instead, then realized she had more to say. She waited until Guillaume hunkered at the fire to add a fresh log.

“Tell me,” she said. “How do you justify this before God? Aside from your feelings about the Germans — I know those well enough — but instead, Nomad? How do you justify condemning him to carry such added burdens to his soul?”

Father Guillaume straightened at the fireplace with a weary groan. “Nomad doesn’t
have
a soul, Giselle.”

“By what authority do you make that decision?” she cried.

“By the authority of the Church!” He returned to the table and sat heavily, angrily, in his chair.

“Then the Church is wrong!”

Guillaume pointed wildly in the direction of the village. “That creature was never conceived like a man. Even a horse, or an ox, or a dog comes into this world by natural birth, but we don’t consider them to possess souls. How much lesser a being than them is Nomad, then? In Nomad I endangered nothing. Because there is no soul within to endanger!”

She drew into herself then, feet like ice, heart like broken fragments of stone. There would be no arguing with the Father, for there was nothing in his mind left open. And what
of
Nomad? She could not believe that he too lay below in a cottage, one more casualty of the night. Had he wreaked his havoc, then fled, unable to face her? He had to know she could forgive him anything.